Wikipedia

Chinese language

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The Chinese language (中文) is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Chinese is a tonal language related to Tibetan and Burmese, but unrelated to other CJK and neighbouring languages genetically, such as, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai or Japanese. However, these languages were strongly influenced by Chinese in the course of history, linguistically, and also extralinguistically. Korean and Japanese both have writing systems employing Chinese characters, which are called Hanja and Kanji respectively. Along with those two languages, Vietnamese also contains many Chinese loanwords.

Speakers and uses

About one-fifth of the world speaks some form of Chinese as their native language. It is common for speakers of Chinese to be able to speak several variations of the language. Typically in southern China, a person will be able to speak the official Mandarin Chinese, the local dialect, and occasionally either speak or understand another dialect, such as Cantonese Chinese. In addition, most educated Chinese will be able to read to some degree Classical Chinese.

In the field of software and communications internationalization, CJK is a collective term for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

The notion of a "Chinese language" may seem at first to be a fiction. The term "Chinese" is employed for the classical written language known as "wen2 yan2 (文言 "literary language")" which was used by Confucius, as well as the modern standard known as "bai2 hua4 (白話 [白话] "vernacular")". It includes many different spoken variations which may be mutually unintelligible. The spoken language of Beijing is for example very different from Cantonese, the conversational language of Hong Kong.

Nevertheless, there are good reasons for using a collective name. The most important one is that Chinese themselves consider the language to be unified entity, and there are good reasons for treating it as such. The most important is that the distinctions between the different variations of Chinese are not very distinct. For example, in writing an informal love letter, one may use informal "bai hua." In writing a newspaper article, the language used is different and begins to include aspects of "wen yan." In writing a ceremonial document, one would use even more "wen yan." The language used in the ceremonial document may be completely different from that of the love letter, but there is a socially accepted continuum existing between the two. Pure "wen yan", however, is rarely used.

There are similar continuums in spoken language. A person living in Taiwan for example, would commonly mix pronunciations, phrases, and words from Mandarin and Min-nan, and these mixtures would be considered socially appropriate under many circumstances. A person living in Hong Kong would use different combinations of Mandarin, colloquial Cantonese, and written Cantonese depending on the social situation.

Another distinctive aspect of the Chinese language is the complex relationship between the various spoken varieties, and the various written varieties. Chinese is written using a logographic script in which one character represents one word element, or morpheme. It is generally the case that a Chinese text written in "bai hua" would be readable by most educated Chinese, but again the relationship between written and spoken Chinese is complicated. For example, an educated person in Hong Kong would be able to write a text in written formal Cantonese which is readable by someone who is a Mandarin speaker. However, that written formal Cantonese, while similar to written formal Mandarin, would be very different from a word-for-word transcription of what the Cantonese speaker would speak and would also be different from written colloquial Cantonese. One might ask: "If formal written formal Cantonese is different from spoken Cantonese, then where does the Cantonese reader learn written formal Cantonese?" The answer is that the individual would learn it in school, just as an English speaker learns how to write and speak "proper" English in school.

More about the varieties of spoken Chinese, in Chinese dialects.

More about the written Chinese language in Chinese written language.

See also Chinese grammar.

More about Chinese characters in Chinese characters.

Computer processing of Chinese

The computerized processing of Chinese characters involves some special issues both in input and character encoding schemes.

History of Chinese

Deciphering the history of Chinese poses an interesting problem. How do you know the pronunciation of a language which is not written phonetically? Nevertheless, there are enough clues in the writing system (especially the xiesheng characters), rhymes in poetry, and transcriptions of foreign names, so that the effort that has been devoted at solving this problem is a testimony to the ingenuity of linguists.

Old Chinese

Old Chinese, sometimes known as 'Archaic Chinese', is the language of the early and mid Zhou Dynasty (11th to 7th centuries B.C.), whose texts include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the 詩經 Shijing, the history of the 書經 Shujing, and portions of the 易經 Yijing (I Ching).

Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qing dynasty philologists. The pioneer of Western study of Old Chinese is the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren, whose work is based on the forms of the characters and the rhymes of the 'Shijing'. The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters also provide hints to their Old Chinese pronunciations.

Middle Chinese

Middle Chinese is the language of the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties (7th through 10th centuries A.D.). It can be divided into an early period, for which the 切韻 'Qieyun' rhyme table (A.D. 601) relates to, and a late period in the 10th, which the 廣韻 'Guangyun' rhyme table reflects. Bernhard Karlgren called this phase 'Ancient Chinese'.

Linguists are confident in having a good reconstruction of which Middle Chinese sounded like. The evidence for the pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern dialect variations, rhyming dictionaries, and foreign translations.

Just as Proto-Indo-European can be reconstructed from modern Indo-European languages, so can Middle Chinese be reconstructed (very tentatively) from modern dialects. In addition, ancient Chinese philologists devoted great amount of effort in summarizing the Chinese phonetic system through "rhyming tables", and these tables serve as a basis for the work of modern linguists. Finally, Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words also provide plenty of clues about the nature of Middle Chinese phonetics.

Old Mandarin

Old Mandarin refers to the language of Yuan dynasty of the 14th century A.D. and preserved in the 'Zhongyuan yinyun' rhyme book.

Modern Chinese

The transition from "wen yan" to "bai hua"

A side product of the May Fourth Movement around the early 1900s popularized vernacular literature.

The creation of a "national language"

Educating Mandarin

Simplified Chinese

The communist government tried to improve the literacy rate of her people by reducing and simplifying the character set in the Chinese language in the 1940s.

The People's Republic of China has officially issued two sets of character simplications, one in 1956, the other in 1964. A third set of character simplifications was drafted in 1977, but withdrawn.

Its effect on the language is still controversial decades later. See Simplified Chinese character for more.

The Future of Chinese

Due to the increasing market strength of mainland China, most overseas Chinese schools have adapted simplified characters. However, unless PRC wants to distance itself from traditional Chinese culture and from Taiwan, traditional characters are here to stay. Indeed, the increasing trading activity among China, Taiwan and Hong Kong has forced Chinese people to overcome the "character-barrier"--maybe in a way that no one have ever dreamed before.


See also

References

  • Hannas, William. C. 1997. Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 082481892X (paperback); ISBN 0824818423 (hardcover)
  • DeFrancis, John. 1990. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0824810686
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